


The Bee & Bourbon

by sierra_roe



Category: The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Canon - Book, Happy Ending, M/M, Nostalgia, Post-Canon, Post-The Magician's Land, Reunions, School Reunion, You Can't Go Home Again, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:00:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27671717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sierra_roe/pseuds/sierra_roe
Summary: Because sitting around and appreciating nature in the Land you conjured into existence can only go so far before you get nostalgic for the world of academia, Quentin accepts an invitation to a Brakebills class reunion. What he finds there is nothing like what he was expecting.A post-Book 3 story.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 13
Kudos: 37
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Bee & Bourbon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nic/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide to @nic, who requested some post-book-3 Quelliot. Hope you enjoy! I ended up re-reading large chunks of all three books as I wrote this, so thank you for the opportunity to revisit this great series.

The invitation arrived as undramatically as if it were any other piece of mail. It must have sat for days at Quentin’s front door, under a pile of flyers, Chinese food menus, and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, before he finally got around to picking up the whole mess. When he scooped it all up, intending to throw the entire pile into the recycling bin, it wasn’t the sight of the envelope that stopped him, but rather the feel. It wasn’t glossy or stiff like the rest of the mail, it was soft, cottony, and imbued with a tingle of magic that raced through his fingertips when they brushed the corner. Something sparked within him when he touched it, some recognition that part of him would always be tied to his past.

He let the rest of the mail fall to the floor and examined the envelope. The creamy white paper was hand-addressed in a looping script: Quentin Coldwater, New York City. There was no return address, but when he turned it over, it was clear from the wax seal on the back where it was from. The key and bee. Brakebills wanted something from him.

After Plum had gone to reclaim her Chatwin roots in Fillory, Quentin had just sort of… stayed in her Manhattan townhouse, ghostlike, inhabiting a space where he didn’t really belong. Maybe it was a little bit of Alice rubbing off on him. To his disappointment, Alice herself had disappeared shortly after the Land had been formed, and now he was alone in the townhouse. She tried to explain it as a niffin thing, but it never really made sense to him. Either way, the icy blue part of her that sometimes flickered behind her eyes had drawn her away from him, to places unknown. Had he been a fool to think that his first big adult romance would work out on the second try, after one person had been turned into a demon and back to human? Probably. But he had always been a romantic at heart. It was all tangled up with the magician part of him, the part that was excited by potential and clung to pieces of the past. And that was the part of him that felt the stirrings of excitement again when he saw the Brakebills seal.

* * *

Nostalgia had gotten the best of him once again, as it turned out.

It hadn’t taken long to realize it. After about 20 minutes at the Brakebills class reunion, he’d started feeling antsy and eyeing the exits. Brakebills was such a small school that they couldn’t really have reunions for just one class at the same time, so this event was attended by a handful of the 10-year reunion crowd (his class), a handful from the 15-year reunion class, of whom he recognized no one, the 20-year reunion class (which was remarkably well attended at a grand total of 10 people all clustered in a corner laughing uproariously and getting drunk), and a smattering of other former students from in-between years that he didn’t have a chance of recognizing.

Once again, he was left feeling like he didn’t really fit in anywhere. He’d been faculty himself too recently to have the same rosy view of the school he once had. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting.

Quentin set his wine glass down on a side table and excused himself from the forced conversation he’d been attempting to make with Surendra, who’d apparently ended up as some sort of magical investment banker. Unsurprisingly, magical investment banking made for just as dull a conversational topic as the vanilla version. 

He stepped outside. The cool night air and the dulling of the sounds of the party as the door closed helped to clear his head. He took a deep breath. There was a faint scent of cigarette smoke in the breeze and he looked around to see a red glow emerging from a dark figure leaning against the wall to the right of the door.

“I’m not usually wrong about parties, and that party looks like someplace I definitely do _not_ want to be.” Eliot stepped from the shadows and Quentin got a flash of himself, as a 17 year old, entering the Brakebills grounds and seeing none other than Eliot for the first time.

“Holy shit. Eliot?”

“Glad to see I’m not the only alumni mixer refugee washed up on the shores of the smokers corner.”

Eliot stubbed out his cigarette on the stone of the building behind him, singeing an ivy leaf in the process (Quentin could imagine the groundskeeper, always keen-eyed, noticing both the ash mark and the cigarette butt in the morning and looking around with narrowed eyes in search of the culprit) and a second later his long legs had carried him to Quentin where they embraced each other in a mutually delighted hug. Quentin couldn’t put his finger on the last time he and Eliot had hugged – it must have been years ago, at this point – but he noticed that Eliot felt different than he remembered, fewer bones and lanky angles, and more solid, lean muscle. He must have started getting serious about Fillorian martial arts training.

“Still smoking Merits, I see.” Quentin said.

“Once a pussy, always a pussy.”

“I can’t believe you’re here! Have you been outside this whole time?”

Eliot shrugged, “I got all the way here, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go in. It’s just… we’re so far from the people we were when we first came here, you know?”

“How about we take ourselves on our own campus tour instead?”

By mutual unspoken agreement, they headed around the building, to the door that faced the back terrace, where they could slip past the party unnoticed. As they stepped through the door, they were surrounded by the comforting feeling of Brakebills with its lit candles and fireplaces, its light flickering off the stone walls and floors rubbed smooth by centuries of students’ shoes. Eliot seemed to relax almost imperceptibly, the subtle tension that had clung to him outside draining away. He reached his hand into his jacket and pulled out a flask, offering it to Quentin with an arched brow. “It’s a nice 15-year bourbon. I always try to stock up when I’m back. We’ve been putting some time into our distilling operations but there’s just no substitute for long term aging, and I’m certainly not going to wait until I’m in my 40s to drink a nice bourbon.”

“Hang on, when you’re back? How much do you just pop through to Earth?”

“Oh, you know, just once in a while to grab some supplies that are hard to come by in Fillory. Coffee, Tupperware, ziplock bags, that sort of thing. You know how annoying things can get when you don’t have the products of the plastic industry salting the earth.” Eliot said breezily.

Quentin took a long pull from the flask. It stung a bit, Eliot coming to Earth and not bothering to mention it to Quentin. But on the other hand, it was a very Eliot move. He’d always moved in his own patterns with little regard for Quentin. It was on the tip of Quentin’s tongue, mingling hot with the bourbon, the urge to snap back a sarcastic response. He bit it back instead. There was no need to ruin the mood.

As they walked through the empty halls, Quentin caught Eliot up on what he’d been up to since they’d last seen each other. He’d been splitting his time between Manhattan and the new Land, working on terraforming spells to shape it and expand it, and even building himself a small cabin. But it wasn’t only that. His main goal was discovering how it was that his Land seemed to be connected to Fillory. The passage was there somewhere, as he’d spotted the Cozy Horse trotting by on several occasions, as well as a handful of other Fillorian creatures, but for the life of him, he couldn’t find it. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard, since the Land was only around ten square acres, small enough to cover the entirety of by foot in well under an hour. Quentin had been back and forth over it so many times that he knew every tree, rock, and hill by heart, but the entrance to the passage must have been twisted into some kind of four dimensional origami that prevented him from finding it. In a way, he felt like Martin Chatwin, hopelessly opening grandfather clocks and coat closets, fumbling around at the back of them, hoping to find fresh Fillorian air blowing through, but finding only mothballs and old wood. He kept expecting that any day, the entrance to Fillory would open up and reveal itself to him. But it never did.

Eliot listened to his story, then said, “There was this urban legend in the town where I grew up – well, I suppose it wasn’t urban, it was a rural legend, but you get the point – anyway, there was this lake near me, and another lake 20 miles away. And there was this story that back in the day, a horse that was pulling a cart fell into one of the lakes and drowned, but a few days later they found it floating in the other lake, like there was some kind of 20-mile-long underwater tunnel connecting the two lakes! I can’t imagine any of it was true, but you’d be surprised how often it would come up.”

Quentin blew out a snort of laughter, “So you’re saying maybe the Cozy Horse just trotted into a Fillorian pond and kept trotting until it popped out in my Land?”

“Look, I’m just saying you shouldn’t rule it out!” Eliot was laughing as well, “That thing is probably immortal anyway, right? So I’d think that holding its breath for an unknown number of interdimensional underwater miles shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“It’s like the opposite of a marine animal, it would have so much drag with that flocked coat and the weird couch shape.”

“I’m not saying it was a quick trip or anything, alright? But it’s not unheard of! Did you know that moose can dive underwater?”

“What? They can not!”

“They can! They can hold their breath and they’re surprisingly graceful beasts in the water.”

Quentin couldn’t stop laughing, imagining the Cozy Horse calmly flutter-kicking its hooves as it swam through an underwater tunnel, then bobbing to the surface and shaking itself off like a dog when it climbed out onto dry land. It felt good to laugh and joke around with Eliot. He hadn’t realized until that moment how much he’d missed this, the stupid banter, the drunken hypothesizing, the kind of bullshitting they’d all done together when they were just the Physical Kids and their biggest concern was passing their midterm exams.

“High King of Fillory, and I’ve still never even seen the Cozy Horse,” Eliot shook his head, “Some good this position is.”

They found that their wandering had taken them upstairs, to the door of the roof deck. They went outside. The air was cool, but it had been warm enough during the day that it hadn’t really settled into a full nighttime chill yet. They sat down on a stone bench, which still retained some of the heat from the day.

“Remember how it felt so big when we first came here?” Eliot asked, looking up at the stars. There were more than you’d ever be able to see in any other part of New York state, but less than you’d see in Fillory. The constellations on Earth looked strange after so long looking at the star patterns of another world.

“It seems so small now.” Quentin said.

“I guess going into another world gives you some perspective huh? Creating another world too.”

They were quiet for a moment. The silence of the Brakebills campus stretched around them, dark and expansive, though they could dimly hear the sounds of the party below now and then when people opened the door. A bat darted overhead, flight path jagging as it caught the insects that buzzed in the summer air. Brakebills had always seemed like the quietest place Quentin could ever imagine when he had first come here, straight from the ever-present background noise of Brooklyn. But that was before he experienced the silence of Fillory, or of his own Land, where the only noises were from the animals and the wind rustling the trees.

Eliot tilted his head back and finished the flask. “Shall we try to brave the party now? I’m pretty sure at the least they’ll have more booze.”

When they entered the room, wonder of wonders, the gathering had somehow picked up and turned into an actual party. People seemed to have consumed enough alcohol that they’d loosened up and there was actually a dance floor going. Quentin and Eliot helped themselves to some wine from the half empty bottles on the sideboard. The pretense of Brakebills propriety seemed to have evaporated after the bartender had gone home for the night, leaving the rest of the bottles of wine as self-serve. A DJ had even shown up from somewhere, spinning actual vinyl on a retro sound system in what would have been an act of pretentiousness to rival any Brooklyn warehouse party, if it wasn’t for the fact that since most modern electronics didn’t work at Brakebills, you were pretty much forced to go old-school if you wanted music at your party.

They stood at the edge of the room, taking it in. “It kind of feels like a high school dance, doesn’t it?” Eliot remarked, “It’s not like we ever had _dances_ at Brakebills, really.”

“I feel like no one who went to Brakebills ever had the classic high school dance experience anyway,” Quentin said, “I mean, I’m assuming you didn’t. I know I didn’t.”

“Well Quentin,” Eliot said, draining his wine glass and setting it aside before extending a hand, “No time like the present. May I have the pleasure?”

“Yeah, I’m positive no one in the history of high school ever said that either.” Quentin was relieved that Eliot had been the one to ask. He’d been trying to work up the courage himself and finding it surprisingly difficult, even though it was something he felt like he should have gotten over at least 15 years ago. He’d just never really had the practice.

Dancing with Eliot to a slow song felt better than it had any right to feel. “I’ll try not to get too Fillorian with my dance moves,” Eliot murmured into his ear. Fillorian courtly dances involved a lot of high kicking steps that would have looked ridiculous on Earth.

Quentin had the odd sensation that he and Eliot fit together physically better than he’d fit with anyone he’d danced with before. It was strange, even through all their long nights of partying in Fillory and Brakebills and New York, somehow the two of them had never actually danced together, not like this. Quentin had a nagging feeling that maybe if they had, he’d have realized some things a lot sooner. Things that he’d been realizing through self-reflection over the past couple years. Things that were on the tip of his tongue to say, and felt like they were ready to fall out messily all over the floor pretty soon if he had another drink.

The song ended. “Let’s get a refill!” Eliot said brightly.

“Perfect,” Quentin said.

It only took two more songs before Eliot was pulling him closer and running his fingers through his hair and telling him how distinguished he looked with white hair, like the sexy professor that everyone in class inevitably wants to bang, and asking if he ever took anyone up on it while he was teaching. “No! And I don’t get why everyone always says that!” Quentin wanted to be offended by the implied breach of professional ethics but he was enjoying the attention far too much to put any real effort into getting upset.

It only took one more song, and surprisingly, zero more glasses of wine, before Quentin was pulling Eliot in, and finally kissing him the way he’d wanted to, the way he realized he should have long ago.

“Kissing on the dance floor like a couple of teenagers… if we’re not careful the Dean is going to come over and tell us to make some space for Jesus,” Eliot said when they paused to take a breath.

Later, when the party was wrapping up, Eliot said, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to do this all night, but I just need to know Q, is this like, ‘just experimenting’-type kissing or is this something else?”

“I… think it might be something else. I’ve had a lot of time to think while I’ve been building the Land, and I think… I think I was missing something that was right there, between us, something I should have seen all along. It was just… the Alice thing… the apocalypse thing… I think I let it blind me a little.”

“Oh, Q,” Eliot said almost sadly, and for a second the breath caught in Quentin’s throat and he was afraid of what would come next. “I know what you mean. That feeling you’re talking about, that’s why I never came to see you when I was back on Earth. I’m sorry I didn’t. It was just too hard.”

The breath left Quentin in a rush and relief filled his lungs. Eliot touched his face and it was like a tingle of electricity ran between them, not magic, but something that felt almost the same. It was fire and energy and light, leaping from between their contact, spilling out into the space around them. Magic had always been an inefficient technology, after all.

“Just come with me Q. Come with me back to Fillory. We’ll make things what they should have been. We’re magicians after all. We re-make things all the time.”

A feeling in Quentin rose up, not unlike the feeling he’d had when he emerged from the passage from Brooklyn and saw the Brakebills lawn stretching out in front of him for the first time, shining and green and brimming with possibility.

“Yes,” Quentin said, “I will.”


End file.
